Research Note and Review of the Empirical Ethical Decision-Making Literature: Boundary Conditions and Extensions

In business ethics, there is a large body of literature focusing on the conditions, factors, and influences in the ethical decision-making processes. This work builds upon the past critical reviews by updating and extending the literature review found in Crafts (J Bus Ethics117(2):221259, 2013) study, extending her literature review to include a total of 141 articles. Since past at the focused on categorizing results based upon decision-making variables, we instead synthesize and look and Intention trends of these based upon the four ethical decision-making categories: Awareness, Behavior, Judgment, and mediation. We focus on the moderation (30 studies) decision-making (23 studies) effects found within these studies and provide an in-depth analysis of future trends. Furthermore, we also highlight key statistical and methodological concerns, outline overarching trends, and directions of future research in empirical ethical decision-making.